Chalmers Conferences, 9th European Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology

A Combined Experimental and Numerical Study of Guidance Cues in the Developing Murine Retina
STEVEN MCDOUGALL

Last modified: 2014-06-09

Abstract


The main focus of the study has been to understand how the various cellular, molecular, and metabolic cues regulate retinal vascular plexus (RVP) growth and form: both in wild-type and transgenic situations. To this end, a number of increasingly intricate mathematical models have been produced, each of which has been closely informed by morphological and molecular data obtained from the related experimental program.

Here, we present an innovative hybrid model that integrates a wide range of key biological mechanisms and provides for the tracking of migrating astrocyte and endothelial tip cells towards the outer retinal boundary throughout retinal development-from embryonic day 15.5 to post-natal day 8. Blood perfusion is included throughout plexus development and the emergent retinal architectures adapt and remodel in response to various biological factors.  The resulting in-silico RVP structures have been compared with whole-mounted ex-vivo retinal vasculatures at various stages of development and agreement is found to be. Such quantitative comparisons between experimental and simulated vasculatures represent a particularly rigorous test for the modelling approach

Keywords


retinal plasticity